Charles O'Rear

Charles O'Rear (born November 26, 1941) is an American photographer. His image was used as the default desktop wallpaper of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. O'Rear started his career with the daily newspapers Emporia Gazette, The Kansas City Star, and Los Angeles Times; worked for National Geographic magazine; and was part of the Environmental Protection Agency's DOCUMERICA project. He began photographing winemaking in 1978. Since 1998, O'Rear has been associated with Corbis, a Seattle-based stock photo company owned by co-founder and former chairman of Microsoft, Bill Gates. Corbis was bought by Visual China Group in 2016, who now distribute his Corbis images on . O'Rear was born in Butler, Missouri, in 1941 and first handled a Brownie camera when he was 10. As a child, he wanted to be a pilot and got his license at the age of 16. He attended State Teachers College and started his career as a sports reporter for the Butler Daily Democrat. In 1961, he joined the daily newspaper Emporia Gazette as a photographer, and in 1962 The Kansas City Star as a reporter-photographer and, in 1966, he moved to Los Angeles to join as a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times. In 1971, National Geographic magazine hired O'Rear to document the lives of Russian villagers in Alaska who called themselves Old Believers. In 1978, the magazine sent him to Napa Valley to photograph the wine region. O'Rear became interested in wine photography and shifted his base to the valley to photograph the region. In 1985, he traveled to Indonesia for another assignment for the magazine where he carried 500 rolls of film and took 15,000 photos. O'Rear has appeared on National Geographic magazine's cover twice: once as "Bird Man" flying an ultralight aircraft and later for the other photograph shown him holding a computer chip in his hand. O'Rear had been associated with the magazine for nearly 25 years (1971 to 1995) and has photographed in 30 countries and every state in the USA.